It could always be worse
By Pete North - December 10, 2021
There are few things in the galaxy more intensely boring than when the Westminster bubble decides its own affairs are more newsworthy than actual news, and it makes this blogger think about jacking it all in. It’s not lost on me that the collapse of the Prime Minister’s miniscule moral authority is news, but not when you recall how inevitable this all was, and how little difference it makes either way.
My chief complaint about the EU was that though you could vote in European elections, that would never really influence the general direction and ultimate destination. If you opposed the project the most you could do was elect a band of over excitable chimpanzees to fling excrement in the European parliament but I never considered that productive. But now we have to come to terms with the fact that we have much the same problem with Westminster. Unless there’s a major constitutional change, there’s no reason to expect a deviation from the depressing trajectory of decline.
In the meantime Westminster remains a sordid endeavour, mired by virtue signalling from those who possess no virtue, and one can’t help feeling that though Boris Johnson ranks among the worst prime ministers of all time, I still have a nagging feeling that he’s the butt plug preventing a flood of political diarrhoea squirting in our faces. On matters of Net Zero and Covid restrictions, the opposition thinks we aren’t going fast or far enough as though the economy wasn’t already circling the drain.
It’s precisely this policy by political triangulation that exacerbates the frustration with politics. Nothing is ever done because it’s the coherent, intelligent thing to do, but because of where its execution places you on the political map. I don’t think for a nanosecond that deep down Ed Davey thinks strapping six foot men calling themselves Geraldine have any business being in the women’s changing rooms, but that’s what being an ultra-woke Lib Dem demands of him these days.
The consequence of this is a nation forced to endure policy that nobody wants (or at the very least think someone else should bear the costs and consequences) that politicians didn’t feel they could stand in the way of, even though the disastrous consequences were well understood and accepted at inception.
It’s all fine to point out that the Boris Johnson doesn’t have the gravitas, skill or intellect to lead the country, but that rings hollow coming from a progressive left in thrall to American identity politics, seeking to carve up everything by race and gender identity, and clearing the way for gender quacks to push puberty blockers on children.
To a point, this doesn’t particularly bother me. Don’t get me wrong, performing unethical medical experiments on children on the back of a divisive socio-political agenda is absolutely horrifying, but every cloud has a silver lining. If the offspring of middle class liberals are sterilising themselves, then it may be for the overall benefit of mankind. It will resolve itself in its own time due to the inherent irreconcilable absurdity.
On other matters, this thoughtless virtue signalling and posturing has consequences of us all. Anyone watching the UK’s peak electricity demand will have noticed the national grid having squeaky bum moment while wholesale prices skyrocket. This is a direct result of the focus on renewable energy and the decarbonisation agenda. Heating and lighting will soon become an expensive luxury for some households. That is not to say that the Tories present any kind of antidote. Though we have the butt-plug in No.10, it’s not a wholly effective seal, and we all know we’ll be subjected to it eventually.
That Britain is on an inexorable collision course with disaster is not news to any observer of actual policy. Successive governments have failed to take their obligations seriously, while imposing their respective narcissistic fantasies. Brexit was supposed to be the wake up call. Our politicians, though, have returned to their idle slumber.
Curiously, it falls to one AC Grayling this morning to make more or less the same case for Brexit that I made in the years following the referendum, He has it that “the UK’s rapid slide into the sewers was kick-started by Brexit. The effects of the dysfunctional constitutional & political arrangements that have long been a slow poison in our system were masked by the benefits of EEC/EU membership for nearly 50 years”.
He’s partly right about that. The single market allowed Britain’s basic needs to run on autopilot, leading the public into a false sense of security, believing the fundamentals are more sound than they actually are. Now that we’ve thrown a spanner in the works, each new crisis reveals long standing policy neglect, particularly in areas like energy, agriculture and trade, where Westminster has all but abandoned any serious thinking.
Those “dysfunctional constitutional & political arrangements” Grayling speaks of are why we ended up as deep in the EU as we were, being that the executive does not see a lack of public consent as an impediment to its agendas. I’ve long taken the view that until the public begins to notice the consequences of this dysfunction, there will be no move to arrest the decline. For now, food inflation is within tolerance but when the winter energy bills land on the doormat, with no long term correction in sight, voters may begin to wake up. These are consequences that cannot be ignored. Britons face a colder, darker and poorer future unless we can break the stranglehold of the virtue signalling elites.
That we have a rudderless unprincipled oaf for a prime minister is not, as is commonly assumed, the consequence of a populist revolt, rather it is the last resort to keep something far worse at bay but ultimately that doesn’t solve anything. It merely postpones the reckoning. We are eventually going to have to bite the bullet and let the left do their worst. If that then isn’t enough to mobilise a movement for democracy then we are nation ill deserving of it.